From Daniel O’Donohue, 29 print-ready folding globe templates (the one above is “Earth Today”; there are also globes of the sun, the moon, the planets, and lots of different “views” of Earth) — every one free to download, print, and fold, and every one customizable into other shapes or create your own, with your own pinned places. via the custom globe builder…
… This project started with a simple observation: we look at maps on screens all day, but almost nobody gets to hold a planet. A paper globe is the cheapest possible spacecraft — print a sheet, cut along the lines, fold, glue, and you are turning the actual shape of the world over in your hands.
Nothing here is decoration. Every globe is built from openly licensed scientific data — NASA satellite imagery, USGS planetary mosaics, Natural Earth cartography, NOAA ocean data, the Smithsonian’s volcano inventory — rendered through real map projections into print-quality PDFs. Each globe credits its source, and the source is always one click away.
The fold shapes are the classics of mathematical cartography: icosahedra, dodecahedra, gores like a 17th-century globemaker would cut, even the Airocean projection that unfolds the world onto twenty triangles with barely any distortion.
The curated globes are free — print as many as you like. When you want a globe that is yours alone — your places pinned, your countries highlighted, your choice of shape — the builder is where it happens…
Getting our minds– and out hands– around the places we are: “Folding Globes.”
Harmonic: “24 Times,” from Gysin-Vanetti: “A collection of twentyfour variations on the theme “clock” created for HeK… Each of these clocks shows time in a distinct form. The result is a sequence of numbers, letters or punctuation marks animated in different ways….”
* J. R. R. Tolkien
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As we orient ourselves, we might spare a thought for William John McGee (or “WJ McGee, without the periods, as he referred to himself); he died on this date in 1912. An inventor, geologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist, he is remembered for his pioneering studies documenting the occurrence of waves of invasions and recessions of ice sheets in North America (thus establishing the complexity of the Great Ice Age). But he worked in a number of governmental and organizational capacities that contributed to teh development of geography as a discipline: e.g., as a director in the U.S. Geological Survey, and as a founder and president of the National Geographic Society. While on the staff of the Bureau of Soils, in 1918, he organized the landmark Conference of Governors on Conservation of Natural Resources, for whihc he has been called the “chief theorist of the conservation movement.”
Progress is a precursor to, perhaps even a prerequisite for, optimism. Not the psychological optimism of cheery moods, but the scientific optimism that is the main subject of this book. Psychological optimism, as I have suggested, is more like resignation—making the best of what you have, finding silver linings. Scientific optimism is forward-looking, even obsessed with a future of possibilities.
Progress, too, is future-oriented. While that may sound trivial to modern ears—of course, progress requires a future—it has not always been so. Even today, progress is a controversial subject. We’re all quite happy to have anesthesia. Less happy for sure about The Bomb. Both are the result of scientific progress.
How do we parse this and many other examples of technologies that are used for good or ill, or many times both? Scientific progress is littered with genies we might rather not have let out of the bottle. Nonetheless, I think that most people would agree that the benefits are undeniable and, by most measures, outweigh the harms. Arguments over progress fill books and journals and podcasts and many other media, most of which rely themselves on some technological progress. Progress is a fraught subject.
Let us try avoiding this complicated morass by separating the idea of progress from the products of progress. This is not just a semantic trick, but a way to see aspects of progress that have shaped human society and attitudes, no matter how you feel about the particular results of that progress. It’s not that I think discussions about the values of progress are not important, but for our purposes here, it is not any particular progress that matters. It is the idea of progress and having that idea as a regular part of our mental lives—as a shared outlook, as an expectation, as commonplace—that have so radically changed us and our social constitution in the last few centuries.
This idea of progress is something that gets much less attention than the products and values of progress, perhaps because it has become so habitual in our thinking that we are all sure we know what it means. Not so. There are many layers of meaning and many aspects to the concept that are worth examining, especially in light of our attempts to redefine optimism, which depends in many ways, and in many not-so-obvious ways, on the idea of progress. So, let’s complicate the idea of progress. That will require us to let go of some familiar associations attached to the word and consider some perhaps unexpected ones.
First, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that progress as an idea is something innate to human beings, that it has been around since people were painting pictures on cave walls. There is no strong evidence that Paleolithic cave artists were expressing an explicit optimism for the future in the way we think of that sentiment today. Most scholars interpret early cave art as tied to immediate concerns—rituals, communication, or sympathetic magic—rather than a conscious projection of hope into an abstract future. There is a lack of explicit progress iconography—of a past or present, a before and after, or a change over time. Indeed, the paintings may just as easily have been a depiction of a recently successful hunt, with no thought of the future.
Several things are required for an idea such as progress to gain a footing, and it was not until the Scientific Revolution that all of those were met. This is not to say that some notion of change did not exist before the late sixteenth century, but with very few exceptions, it seems that change was either not highly regarded or simply occurred so slowly as to go largely unnoticed.
It may seem remarkable, but the Athenian Greeks, so admired for providing the foundations of philosophy and democratic ideals of governance and even an early devotion to something we could sort of call science, had no single word for progress. There were words that could loosely be translated as progress but they were more like “change” or “increase” or some vague property that we might now associate with progress. To the extent that progress was considered, it was typically thought to be undesirable. Progress and the change associated with it were a source of dissolution and decay, a further loss of the innocence of the Golden Age of the ancestors. They were the opposite of stability and dependability. Consider the mythic fates of Icarus, Prometheus, Hercules—all were punished rather severely for trying to expand knowledge, to make progress.
The Platonic ideal of transcendent forms that exist in eternity is another block to progress, because, strictly speaking, there is no open future and no such thing as invention. As E.R. Dodds put it in his famous essay, “The Ancient Concept of Progress,” “What the ancients call invention is but recollection of a reality which is already there—nothing entirely new can ever come into being.” There is nothing new under the sun, only perhaps approaches to more perfect versions that already exist in some transcendent place.
Yes, the Greeks made remarkable advances in mathematics, but mostly in geometry, which is about solid, stable objects and uses a strict hierarchy of axioms, rules, and procedures—very Platonic. I doubt the Greeks could have imagined calculus, the mathematics of change. Indeed, no one would until nearly two thousand years after Euclid. What progress was made in some technological areas—navigation, shipbuilding—was seen as the pinnacle of achievement. There was little motivation to go further.
There were exceptions, but they were outliers. Archimedes wrote, “I apprehend that some either of my contemporaries or of my successors will be enabled to discover other theorems in addition, which have not as yet occurred to me.” In the second century BCE, the astronomer Hipparchus compiled a list of the fixed stars so that future astronomers might compare his observations to their own and discover what might have changed.
But these ideas, it seems, did not percolate into the society of philosophers, politicians, and the average man, and were not taken up by the Roman civilization that supplanted the Athenian and Alexandrian Greeks. Roman science consisted mainly of improving technologies in civil engineering (water and road systems) and warfare, compiling medical knowledge, and developing tools for specialized uses. There was little of discovery and interest beyond this sort of technology development.
Progress fared only slightly better in the long period from the fall of Rome (c. 475 CE) to the Renaissance (in the fourteenth century)—one thousand years during which change was so slow that for nearly forty generations, most people saw little or no change in technology during their lifetimes (except perhaps in warfare). You would likely do what your parents did and your children would do as you did. Options were limited. It’s not that there was no progress, but that within a single generation, so little changed as to be imperceptible.
Think of the stirrup, sometimes credited as being one of the three most important inventions in the course of history. (The plow and gunpowder are the other two, or the printing press, depending on your perspective.) The stirrup probably originated in the Far East in the first century CE and was introduced in Europe around the seventh century. It remained of critical importance from then until about one hundred years ago, when horsemanship quite suddenly was no longer a required skill. That’s thirteen hundred years of the same individual transportation technology. Julius Caesar and Thomas Jefferson both traveled around their lands by horse.
Robert Merton, the renowned sociologist of science, has made the case that in spite of the occasional bright star or beacon of discovery in the earlier periods (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon), they were not enough to support a scientific infrastructure, or the social requirements of a scientific community. To remain viable, science must be widespread and continuous, able to spread and connect with other ideas and other minds.
The Renaissance brings a spark of life to more worldly intellectual pursuits, and the very beginnings of science can be seen toward the end of that period and the start of what may be termed the early modern period (the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries). The Renaissance, as the name implies, was a rebirth of interest in classical (i.e., Greek and Roman) culture, and so was a look back as much as forward. Nonetheless, the Renaissance provided a kind of onramp to the Scientific Revolution and the much speedier pace of progress associated with it.
This faster pace was a key element that allowed progress to become an idea, a viewpoint, a mental and social state. For that to happen, progress must be experienced within a generation, within a single lifetime. That means it must be rapid. I would go a step further and propose that for the idea of progress to become manifest, it must not only be rapid, but it must also accelerate. It is not enough for progress to be fast; the very rate of progress must increase. Then, and only then, will the idea, as much as its products, take hold of a society. It is a kind of cognitive bias that results from the way our sensory systems interact with the world that we are more aware of acceleration than of speed. Like flying in a plane, you don’t really notice the speed when it is constant, only when there is acceleration.
Four critical prerequisites are necessary for the idea of progress to develop and become a driving force in society. Each of these arose separately over the course of time from Athenian Greece, but they came together in the Scientific Revolution and its immediate aftermath. They are what produced the idea of progress.
First is a transition from a circular to a linear view of time and history. Circular philosophies of recurrence, common in many cultures and religious systems, are not as susceptible to progress, since they conceive of the world as repeating history in an endless cycle. For the Greeks, the circle was the perfect shape because this reflected their worldview of recurrence. Most ancient calendars are in the form of a circle, based on recurring astronomical events and repeating seasons.
Even today, astrological calendars supposedly reflecting ancient views arrange the zodiacal months in a circle. The linear calendar we live and work with now is effectively infinite; you just keep adding days. (On the Calendar app provided with my Apple computer, I was able to scroll one hundred years into the future to 2125, and there seemed to be no end in sight.) This calendar takes for granted that time will proceed without end and therefore that unending progress is also possible. Although the short biblical history and prophecy of a coming apocalypse truncate the literal religious timescale, it was the Judeo-Christian adoption of a linear calendar that provided, if unintentionally, the ground for an open-ended view of continued progress. As J. B. Bury put it in his book The Idea of Progress, “You have not got the idea of progress until you go on to conceive that it is destined to advance indefinitely into the future.”
A considerable body of scholarship exists on the shift from circular to linear time and its effects on philosophy, society, and culture. Much of it is also wrapped up in the invention of mechanical clocks, in particular the mechanical clocks of medieval Europe. that progressed indefinitely—the second, the minute, and the hour. Today, we argue about the merits of daylight saving time, but until the advent of clocks, hours were simply split into equal portions of day and night. During the summer, daytime hours were longer—twelve of them needed to cover the day. Likewise, nighttime hours were shorter since there had to be twelve of them packed into the shorter night. In the winter, this was reversed. Time was thus malleable and very local.
Keeping time in constant units allowed advances in navigation and in communication and collaboration over distances—time units were now the same everywhere. Time could be parceled into measurable packets, but it was also continuous and unending. There was now a distinct past, present, and future. Calendars possessed an infinite timeline. Once a future existed, there could be progress…
As we parse progression, we might spare a thought for Peter Cooper Hewitt; he died on this date in 1921. An electrical engineer, he studied the production of light using electrical discharges (while Thomas Edison was still developing incandescent filaments) and, in 1901, invented the first mercury-vapor lamp, an important forerunner of fluorescent lamps.
Hewitt also developed the mercury arc rectifier, the first rectifier that could convert alternating current power to direct current without mechanical means. It was widely used in electric railways, industry, electroplating, and high-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission. Although it was largely replaced by power semiconductor devices in the 1970s and 1980s, it is still used in some high power applications.
Over the past two decades, we’ve been reallocating our time away from offices, malls, and classrooms… and toward home and solitude. Hyunsoo Rim illustrates…
With our Covid-induced lockdowns now a moderately foggy memory for most, the last few years have turned out to be a continued normalization for many of the habits that defined the pandemic era.
Peloton bikes are now doubling as coat racks; the banana bread craze has cooled; Zoom’s share price is almost back to where it started; millions of people have gone back to clothes shopping in person; and companies like Del Monte are stuck with mountains of unsold canned fruit that’s no longer flying off the shelves.
But one seismic lifestyle change has proven far more permanent than any fitness fad or panic-buying spree — and it turns out to be part of a much longer trend that’s been building for decades: Americans are spending more time at home, and alone. And not everyone has the means to break that growing trend…
[Rim uses infographics to chart American’s use of time…]
… According to the annual American Time Use Survey (ATUS) — a self-reporting survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — an average American’s typical day still breaks down pretty much the same as it did 20 years ago. Roughly a third still goes to sleep, a fifth to leisure and sports, and, perhaps most surprising to anyone feeling burned out, just one-sixth to work. The rest goes to household chores, meals, and everything else. The survey does, of course, represent the average, with many retirees likely skewing the work figures down.
But if you look closer, the routines underneath tell a different story about how the collective American experience has changed.
Over the past two decades, Americans have gained about 30 minutesof sleep per day — now averaging over nine hours, more than ever — and spend roughly 11 more minuteson household activities such as cooking, cleaning, and pet care.
Where did those extra hours come from? It seems like we’ve carved them out of work commutes, mall trips, and in-person classes… activities that usually have us interacting with others out in public in some way.
Some of this shift can certainly be explained by demographic factors — America is an older country than it was in 2003, as birth rates have dropped. Nevertheless, on aggregate, the figures are pretty staggering for a nation of 340+ million people — and the sharp rise in the pandemic era suggests at least a decent amount of the shift is behavioral.
Indeed, in 2003, the average American spent 7.7 hours per day at home, according to the ATUS data compiled by IPUMS. By 2024, that rose to 9.1 hours, with the pandemic only accelerating the climb…
… what’s more striking is how time once spent outside or with others has steadily moved in the opposite direction…
… As more of our daily lives have moved home and online, the same shift is reshaping how we unwind. Since 2003, time spent socializing and communicating — from hanging out with family and friends to hosting events — has fallen 24%, while travel time is down 26%…
… But not everyone is experiencing the shift in the same way. As evidence for the K-shaped economy — where some groups thrive while others struggle — becomes harder to ignore, income is proving to be a strong differentiator.
In fact, households earning under $35,000 now spend about 10 hours a day at home, almost an hour and a half longer than those earning $150,000 or more. The pattern holds for time spent alone, too, with a two-hour daily gap between the lowest- and highest-income groups…
… wealthier Americans aren’t just spending less time at home; they’re more likely to pay their way out of it, with restaurant meals instead of cooking, pilates classes instead of home workouts, or washer-dryer combos instead of hours tied up in chores.
For the very wealthiest, that logic even goes further: according to a recent survey by Long Angle, nearly two-thirds of multimillionaires now outsource housekeeping, while about half pay for gardening services and two-fifths employ nannies.
Of course, time at home and alone isn’t inherently negative — as researchers note that, for many, solitude can be valued as a way to rest, think, or create. But when more of your day is taken up by unpaid chores and low-cost, home-bound leisure, that retreat indoors starts to look less like a choice…
Americans are spending more time at home and alone — and money determines who can opt out. Eminently worth reading in full: “Home. Alone.” from @sherwood.news.
* Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (August 28, 1988)
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As we contemplate our calendars, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that kids across America could “go out” even as they stayed in: they were invited for the first time into Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, as the series premiered on NET (which later became PBS). The show had had earlier local incarnations in Canada, then in Pittsburgh, where the national show was birthed and produced. Michael Keaton, who worked for the Pittsburgh public television station WQED at the time, often helped out with Roger’s show. And future horror director George A. Romero worked on the show shooting short films.
Detail from Adams Synchronological Chart of Universal History created by Sebastian C Adams in 1881, a visual representation of world history, spanning from 4004 BCE to 1881 CE (the David Rumsey Map Collection)
A companion of a sort to last Friday’s post: In the 19th century, the linear idea of time became dominant. As Emily Thomas explains, that has had profound implications for how we experience the world…
‘It’s natural,’ says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘to think that time can be represented by a line.’ We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen line ahead. We ride an ever-moving arrow – the present. However, this picture of time is not natural. Its roots stretch only to the 18th century, yet this notion has now entrenched itself so deeply in Western thought that it’s difficult to imagine time as anything else. And this new representation of time has affected all kinds of things, from our understanding of history to time travel.
Let’s journey back to ancient Greece. Amid rolls of papyrus and purplish figs, philosophers like Plato looked up into the night. His creation myth, Timaeus, connected time with the movements of celestial bodies. The god ‘brought into being’ the sun, moon and other stars, for the ‘begetting of time’. They trace circles in the sky, creating days, months, years. The ‘wanderings’ of other, ‘bewilderingly numerous’ celestial bodies also make time. When all their wanderings are ‘completed together’, they achieve ‘consummation’ in a ‘perfect year’. At the end of this ‘Great Year’, all the heavenly bodies will have completed their cycles, returning to where they started. Taking millennia, this will complete one cycle of the universe. As ancient Greek philosophy spread through Europe, these ideas of time spread too. For instance, Greek and Roman Stoics connected time with their doctrine of ‘Eternal Recurrence’: the universe undergoes infinite cycles, ending and restarting in fire.
Such views of time are cyclical: time comprises a repeating cycle, as events occur, pass, and occur again. They echo processes in nature. Day and night. Summer to winter. As the historian Stephen Jay Gould explains in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), within the West, cyclical conceptions dominated ancient thought. It’s even hinted at in the Bible. For example, Ecclesiastes proclaims: ‘What has been will be again … there is nothing new under the sun.’ Yet, Gould writes, the Bible also contains a linear conception of time: time comprises a one-way sequence of unrepeatable events. Take Biblical history: ‘God creates the earth once, instructs Noah to ride out a unique flood in a singular ark.’ Gould describes this linear understanding of history as an ‘important and distinctive’ contribution of Jewish thought. Biblical history helped power linear ideas of time.
Cyclical and linear conceptions of time thrived side by side for centuries, sometimes blurring into one another. After all, we live through natural, cyclical seasons and unrepeatable events – birth, first marriage, death. Importantly, medievals and early moderns didn’t literally see cyclical time as a circle, or linear time as a line. Yet in the 19th-century world of frock coats, petticoats and suet puddings, change was afoot. Gradually, the linear model of time gained ground, and thinkers literally began drawing time as a line…
[Thomas explores four key developments that fueled the shift, chronography (the development of timelines), Darwin and the emergence of the concept of evolution, chronophotography, and theories in math and physics of a “fourth dimension” (then explored by Einstein and Bergson, Mary Calkins and Victoria Welby, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and so many others…]
… Today, conceiving of time as a line remains widespread. Timelines are everywhere: in the history of evolution, the history of video games, and the history of chocolate. There’s even a timeline of timelines. And the effects of this line of thought (pun intended) are still with us. Philosophers continue to debate the reality of past and future: just check out this bumper encyclopaedia article on ‘Presentism’, ‘the view that only present things exist’. Time-travel stories run rife. Back to the Future. Groundhog Day. The Time Traveler’s Wife. Historians have largely dropped Victorian faith in the progress of humanity, yet progress stories about particular areas remain. For example, take this timeline: it straightforwardly depicts technological progress over time. All these ideas are powered by the notion that time is a line. Were we to reshape our idea of time, perhaps these other ideas would also find themselves bent into new forms…
As we wonder at Yeat’s widening gyre, we might send echoing birthday greetings to Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu; he was born on this date in 1689. Better known simply as Montesquieu, he was a French judge, historian, and political philosopher.
Montesquieu is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented (if not always observed) in many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word “despotism” in the political lexicon. His anonymously published The Spirit of Law (De l’esprit des lois, 1748; first translated into English in 1750) was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies, and influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States in drafting the U.S. Constitution.
We may all received time uniformly, but we tend to experience it wildly differently. Jonny Thaw had an issue with the way that we commonly refer to years-in-history, more specifically to the use of BC and AD (or BCE and CE) as a demarcation…
2025 AD? Wah?
I know that I live in 18 AiP (after iPhone)(as of 43 AL (after laptop)) and that makes it much easier because its talking about things that I KNOW
I don’t know an anno domini, i dont know a christ, let alone trying to comprehend what came before them??
So he did somethng about it: he created Improved Relative Time, which lets one create a categorical suffix appropriate to one’s own interests/experience.
For example, this year is 2025 AD (or CE)… but it is also 5000 AA (After Astrolabe) or 2400 AADRM (After Animal-Driven Rotary Drill) or 26 AG (After Google) or 3800 AOL (After the Origin of Language) or 585 APP (After the Printing Press) or 7500 AS (After Sailing) or 2500 ATS (After Toe Stirrup) or 123 AVC (After Vacuum Cleaner) or 2400 AW (After Wheelbarrow) or 133 AZ (After Zipper).
Dozens more examples (with links to sources), in what amounts to an amusingly formatted timeline, at Improved Relative Time.
* Seneca the Younger
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As we articulate the arc of history, we might recall that it was on ths date in 1965 that Bob Dylan entered the UK pop chart for the first time with “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” which peaked at #9 three weeks later.
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